Adults Quotes - Page 15

Photo © Michel Delsol
I'm no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates. Because I want to live forever in wonder. The difference between me as a child and me as an adult is this and only this: when I was a child, I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now, I know, as much as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So it matters little whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or, by dream. I do not see, for there is no I to see. That is what the pirates know. There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be a pirate.

Kathy Acker

Dream, Children, Book

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Even when all the paperwork-a marriage license, a notarized deed, two birth certificates, and seven years of tax returns-clearly indicates you're an adult, but all the same, there you are, clutching the phone and thanking God that you're still somebody's daughter.

Kelly Corrigan

Daughter, Phones, Years

"The Middle Place". Book by Kelly Corrigan, www.today.com. 2005.

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If getting our kids out into nature is a search for perfection, or is one more chore, then the belief in perfection and the chore defeats the joy. It's a good thing to learn more about nature in order to share this knowledge with children; it's even better if the adult and child learn about nature together. And it's a lot more fun.

Richard Louv

Nature, Children, Fun

Richard Louv (2008). “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder”, p.164, Algonquin Books

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I have seen Tasmanian devils battle over a carcass. I have seen lionesses crowding a kill, dingoes on the trail of a feral piglet, and adult croc thrashing its prey to pieces. But never, in all the animal world, have I witnessed anything to match the casual cruelty of the human being.

Terri Irwin

Animal, Battle, Piglet

Terri Irwin (2008). “Steve & Me”, p.227, Simon and Schuster

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Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature. Life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows. Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good can always triumph over evil.

Walt Disney

Children, Parenting, Reality

Walt Disney, Kathy Merlock Jackson (2006). “Walt Disney: Conversations”, p.54, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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I had trouble listening to adults who didn't really mean anything that they said; it was as if their language poured into my ears only to drain right out a little spigot in the back of my head.

Reif Larsen

Mean, Listening, Ears

Reif Larsen (2010). “The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet: A Novel”, p.318, Penguin

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If babies held the same tendency toward self-criticism as adults, they might never learn to walk or talk. Can you imagine infants stomping, 'Aarggh! Screwed up again!' Fortunately, babies are free of self-criticism. They just keep practicing.

Dan Millman

Baby, Self, Criticism

Dan Millman (2010). “Body Mind Mastery: Training for Sport and Life”, p.48, New World Library

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Sometimes I think high school is one long hazy activity: if you are tough enough to survive this, they'll let you become an adult. I hope it's worth it.

Laurie Halse Anderson

School, Thinking, Long

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I always looked forward to being an adult, because I thought the adult world was, well—adult. That adults weren’t cliquey or nasty, that the whole notion of being cool, or in, or popular would case to be the arbiter of all things social, but I was beginning to realize that the adult world was as nonsensically brutal and socially perilous as the kingdom of childhood.

Peter Cameron

Childhood, World, Kingdoms

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A tyrannous and gluttonous demand for affection can be a horrible thing. But in ordinary life no one calls a child selfish because it turns for comfort to its mother; nor an adult who turns to his fellow "for company." Those, whether children or adults, who do so least are not usually the most selfless.

C. S. Lewis

Mother, Children, Selfish

C. S. Lewis (1971). “The Four Loves”, p.15, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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I am twenty years old. To a world-wise adult, I am little more than a child. To any child, however, I am old enough to be distrusted, to be excluded forever from the magical community of the short and beardless.

Dean Koontz

Wise, Children, Years

Dean Koontz (2014). “Odd Thomas: You Are Destined to Be Together Forever (Short Story)”, p.1, Bantam

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At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored; that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.

Jean Cocteau

Childhood, Quality, Cost

Jean Cocteau (1966). “The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles)”, p.23, New Directions Publishing

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I didn't realize then that so much of being adult is reconciling ourselves with the awkwardness and strangeness of our own feelings. Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience

Douglas Coupland

Feelings, Youth, Realizing

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... once you were in, they put a note in your file that said you were in therapy, and all your teachers saw that file. They might as well have tattooed CRAZY on your forehead. The next year every teacher would be watching you for the first weird thing you did—and has there ever been a kid who never does anything an adult considers weird?

John Barnes

Teacher, Crazy, Kids

John Barnes (2009). “Tales of the Madman Underground”, p.15, Penguin

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...You don't always get what you expect. I wish someone, sometime when I was growing up, would have told me what expectations would get me. ... Our parents, schools, everyone tells us things will be a certain way when we're adults and if they're not that way, we should make them be; or at least pretend. But after a certain point that just doesn't work.

Chris Crutcher

Growing Up, School, Expectations

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When I have something to say that I think will be too difficult for adults, I write it in a book for children. Children are excited by new ideas; they have not yet closed the doors and windows of their imaginations. Provided the story is good... nothing is too difficult for children.

Madeleine L'Engle

Children, Book, Writing

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Ordinary adults don't like children to speak of things that are denied them by their own gray minds.

Jasper Fforde

Children, Mind, Ordinary

"The Eyre Affair". Book by Jasper Fforde, July 19, 2001.

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Such a bad mistake it would be, to embark on marriage and adult life without a nice supply of duct tape.

Nancy Werlin

Mistake, Nice, Would Be

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As Carl Jung once said, 'When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.' When our boys become adults, we become their inner situation. We become inner voices they often hear in their work, relationships and spiritual practice.

Michael Gurian

Spiritual, Fate, Boys

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What do you eat?" "Baby bunnies." She narrowed her eyes, so I grinned and said, "Adult bunnies, too. I'm an equal-opportunity bunny-eater.

Maggie Stiefvater

Baby, Eye, Opportunity

Maggie Stiefvater (2014). “Shiver Series (Shiver, Linger, Forever, Sinner)”, p.71, Scholastic Inc.

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I had come to discover that "safe" was an illusion, a pretense that adults wrapped around their children- and sometimes themselves- to make the world seem comfortable. I had discovered that under that thin cover of let's-pretend, monsters and nightmares lay, and that not all of them came from places like the moonroads or the nightling cities. Some of the monsters were people we knew. People we thought we could trust.

Holly Lisle

Children, Cities, People

Holly Lisle (2009). “The Silver Door”, p.166, Scholastic Inc.

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We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared.

Michael Chabon

Children, Believe, Ambition

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Christophe, with the careful tone of an adult telling a kid not to pet the nice foaming-rabid pooch.

Lilith Saintcrow

Nice, Kids, Pet

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To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflict than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity.

Maya Angelou

Inspirational, Maturity, Battle

Maya Angelou (2009). “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”, p.267, Random House

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Evolution is not a genetically controlled distortion of one adult form into another; it is a genetically controlled alteration in a developmental program.

Richard Dawkins

Evolution, Program, Form

Richard Dawkins (2009). “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution”, p.314, Simon and Schuster

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